The Man With No Name

How I’m Sort Of Becoming A Runner

There always seemed to be a gulf of difference to me, between someone who isn’t a runner and someone who is.

I’ve run about twenty times now – 2-3 times a week, and I’m pretty much in love with it. But I figured while it’s still fresh, I should write down how the switch happened.

I’ve had a sedentary life. I have relatively good appearance genes, meaning I look somewhat in shape even if I might not be even close. So I was kind of coasting on that, reassuring myself that I wasn’t getting fat. But it’s deceptive. My jeans were getting tight anyway, I was slumping, my energy was crap, and I’d experience weird sugar low feelings. I was getting worried about glucose levels and my ears would always perk up when I’d hear people talking about diabetes.

I’ve thought about running in the past. “Hey, maybe I should take up running.” With all the negative associations with it that any non-runner would have. Plus a few extra of my own, I suppose. The decision to start always felt like this huge mmmmmph effort that was really hard to get over. And the tiniest reasons to not start would be sufficient reasons to not start.

There were a few things that finally got me over the hump.

First, I didn’t have a concept of how people actually do it. Do they do it after a meal? Before? Does it make sense to do it before? There were general questions of daily timing that were flummoxing me. Finally I stumbled into a scenario where I got into a conversation with a runner about that. She told me she wakes up, brushes her teeth, runs, comes home, then showers and eats (or eats and showers, depending on how she feels). That combined with me stumbling across an article – saying that running before eating in the morning is actually a good thing because it burns fat rather than recent calorie intake – untangled some knots for me. I had assumed it was necessary to eat beforehand or else you’d be getting no benefit.

The other was finding the right running clothes. I felt dumb going and shopping for running clothes before actually starting to run, because I wasn’t a runner. I know, it sounds dumb, but these are the kinds of things that get in the way psychologically. But I had some hiking clothes that work.

Finally was finding a route. A route that I would often walk/hike was the Leif Erikson trail nearby – it has mile markers every quarter mile, and it’s a wide dirt road.

I’ll tell you what *didn’t* help – buying all the technical gear. About a year ago I went out and bought an ipod nano, the nike+ stuff, and an armband, thinking that would mean I’d *have* to start running. Instead it just felt like a big obligation and I rebelled against it. When I finally started, I wasn’t even able to find the nike+ stuff. Some house elf stole it or something.

The final thing that helped was setting up a spreadsheet. I’m the type of personality that loves tracking progress and hates goals. Goals suck because there’s the risk of failing to achieve them. But regularly tracking and measuring progress, and continually seeing that you are improving (which implies a direction and “goal” anyway) – that stuff is awesome.

So for my first run, it didn’t so much matter that it was a sixteen minute mile pace since I could barely run and walked most of it. What was great was seeing it go down to fifteen minutes the next week, and then thirteen minutes a week later as I finally found a very slow jog pace that I was able to keep going for the entire distance.

Since then it’s just been a progression. I got interested in how to increase my times, which led me to find out about different training zones. I started feeling sore in weird ways and decided I had ran enough to go buy actual running shoes rather than the old running shoes I had had from several years previous. (I should’ve gotten them first but I just didn’t feel ready to go into a running store.) And I’m lucky enough to have a friend that is also a beginner and is motivated by me and vice versa – and we just signed up for a 5k together. My first race!

Update: I would be remiss (and in fact, already was) to not point out that said friend was also quite helpful and encouraging and motivational during my long stage of hemming, mulling, and hawing about eventually starting to run. There was one conversation in there – can’t remember the details, but it apparently happened at the right time to push me over the hump – that was pretty key in getting me to start. You are a goddess, Sarah!